


Five Late Nights

by opus44



Category: The West Wing
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-14 16:42:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28798578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/opus44/pseuds/opus44
Summary: And the fact was, it had been since before Andi that he and CJ had last slept together. It had been years. Maybe you didn’t ever lose that awareness of your ex-lovers, maybe you always worried at the edges of those relationships even if everything else lay flat and smooth between you.
Relationships: C. J. Cregg/Toby Ziegler
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	Five Late Nights

**Author's Note:**

> Part one of five.

Toby wasn’t often the last one there, but sometimes he was, crafting and recrafting something: language for a prayer breakfast, language for a state dinner. Meals he wouldn’t be eating, standing in the back with his water glass pressed to his temple, listening to the president come down from the mountain line by glorious line. President Bartlett could deliver a speech to send soldiers off to their deaths singing.

The hardest part about Toby’s job was how the president could make the worst cliches sound like poetry. Toby might be his president’s voice, but his president would have pipes no matter the words coming out of his mouth. 

That means you’re both doing your jobs. He still needs you, CJ had reminded him, the two of them huddled in the back of the ballroom last week as Toby winced through the president’s remarks. Well, Toby huddled. CJ never did; she stood as straight as ever, poised. He looked at the smooth planes of her back in her dove-gray dress, and then he made himself look away.

As usual, he’d been taking a good thing and bludgeoning himself with it.

These were bad thoughts, pointless and bad, the kind he was prone to past midnight. Well past midnight, maybe quarter to two. He didn’t know for sure; he’d put his watch in the drawer the way he did when he was writing late, when no one needed him for anything else. 

It’d been awhile since he’d been asked to do something so simple as craft a speech. All week he’d been haranguing congressmen about coming over to their side on funding entitlement programs, which meant he’d been reading every morning about entitlement programs, ten page memos from his staff on Medicaid and Medicare and the encroaching heat death of social security. He highlighted and flagged and rearranged and then every afternoon, just when he began to feel like a kettle exploding with steam, he went into the Roosevelt Room and roared at some shivering wreck of a rep from Wyoming until the kid melted under the pressure.

It was blood sport, and he shouldn’t enjoy it the way he did, the way he knew Josh did, too. Sam could sit across from a pair of freshman Republican congressmen who wanted to take teddy bears away from the nation’s children, and he’d smile at them through the debate. With his own opponents, Leo was a fist in a velvet glove, all silky threat he never had to deliver on. In the end, they always bowed. In the end they’d invite Leo to their daughter’s wedding.

But Josh would key your mom’s car just for fun, and Toby laid out bear traps, then laughed at you when you caught your foot in one.

The thing was, Leo liked people. Sam did too—they knew their neighbors, made friends on planes, chatted with strangers in line for coffee. That was the fundamental difference between them, Toby thought. Sam and Leo liked people, and Josh was afraid of them, afraid of being found out to be a fraud, and Toby? Toby didn’t like people at all. 

Sure, he liked the idea of people. He liked people like a flag he was fighting for in a foreign country, like a story he’d loved as a kid. But one-on-one, most people made him want to tear his face off.

This line of thinking, it made it impossible to write words that could possibly come out of the president’s mouth. He set his pen down, pulled out his watch. 2:15 in the morning. Out the window of his office the bullpen was empty.

Still, he was certain CJ hadn’t gone home yet, and he let himself imagine it for a moment—CJ with her feet up, glasses at the end of her nose, trying to learn the entire history of Indochinese politics before she went home for the night. It bemused him, how he always knew if she was still in the building. It wasn’t intuition, he didn’t think, it was more like a corner of his brain spent the day cataloguing the signs. Was there a briefing before 10 tomorrow morning? Had Sam dropped a fifty-page memo on her desk about school prayer, and done it after dinner? And maybe too he was getting half-glimpses of Carol as she made copies and coffee in the dark of the bullpen, while he was trying to get down another two hundred words before bed.

CJ liked people, too. It was easy to get her attention, and it was nice to bask in its glow. Whether you were a star-struck cadet she was wrangling for a photo op with the president or the Prime Minister of Israel or Bruno Gianelli trying it on with her for the thousandth time that week, she’d treat you with the same brassy equanimity. She was all banter and brains and beneath that, indomitable will, like one of Shakespeare’s best heroines, and she was like that with enemies and friends alike. 

And he was her oldest friend. Toby didn’t think he necessarily deserved that honor; it was just that, working the way they did, everyone that wasn’t yoked into the harness with you tended to fall behind. He was the last one standing. He’d known CJ for seventeen years and for the last four of those, he’d worked with her twenty hours a day, and somewhere along the line he’d learned that, growing up, her brothers called her Jeanie, and that some nights she fell asleep on the sofa to old episodes of M*A*S*H, and that she’d loved _Anna Karenina_ so much that she’d been a Russian literature minor in Berkeley ( _in translation_ , she’d tell her listener, _I speak nyet Russian_ ).

They weren’t confessions she’d made to him in the dark of some campaign bus stop outside Indianapolis. They’d hadn’t ever gotten drunk and plumbed the depths of each other’s souls—when CJ was drunk at a dive bar, she wanted to talk shop, or she wanted to dance. Nothing in between. 

It was just that he’d been there for it. All of it. Her eating takeout soup in his office while paging through some teen girl catalog, asking Toby if he thought her niece would like this crocheted headband; her offering a sympathetic eyebrow in the bullpen after he crawled back from bickering with Andi on the Hill about the latest foreign policy initiative. 

But Sam had been there for all of that, too, and Josh, and hell, even Donna, and CJ treated them all with the same no-nonsense cheerfulness, and—

He pushed back his desk chair. Maybe two in the morning wasn’t the time to unpack this.

But it made him feel cheap, a little, or no, it wasn’t that. It made him wonder if their friendship felt cheap to her. Easy. They didn’t have to work for it. He didn’t have to prove anything to her. But neither did anyone else.

And the fact was, it had been since before Andi that he and CJ had slept together. It had been years. Maybe you didn’t ever lose that awareness of your ex-lovers, maybe you always worried at the edges of those relationships even if everything else lay flat and smooth between you. 

Maybe you always thought about the way she wore an evening gown, the little hitch in her breath the last time you—

Toby stood. The bullpen was dark. He’d told Ginger to go home, and unlike Donna, who was an endless martyr to the Cause (even if, as he suspected, the Cause was Proving Your Devotion To Joshua Lyman, which—why would that ever be a tree you would want to bark up?), his secretary had gladly taken off for the night. Even Sam had begged off around eleven.

He could hear it, though, even before he rounded the corner: CJ clacking away at her keyboard. For once Carol wasn’t there.

She looked up from her laptop, her hair in the same elegant line it had been when she’d come in that morning. “I just sent her home,” CJ said, and stretched. “Carol. I told her she was acting like Donna.”

Toby bit back a smile. “The Taiwan briefing still giving you trouble?” he asked, sitting on her couch.

“I’m just trying to collate the research on our latest arms treaty with China,” she said. “I mean, Carol collated the research. I’m trying to make _sense_ of the research. Well, it’s not that it doesn’t make sense—”

“It’s time to call it, Claudia Jean,” he said, gently. “It’s two AM. It’s only gonna get worse from here on out.”

“Will it make more sense at dawn? I think not.” 

“You'll find out in four hours,” he said, “but to me, it sounds like a losing battle. Turf the briefing to State. This situation isn’t going away tomorrow, you’ll have plenty of time to have Sam give you a primer in the morning."

She brightened a bit at that. “He’ll have time?”

“For you? I’ll make sure he has time.” He said it softer than he’d meant to, and his gut turned over—had he given too much away? Then he paused to ask himself: what, exactly, would I be giving away?

He needed to go home. Alone.

But CJ was taking her coat off the rack, a soft belted number she’d had for at least ten years ( _CJ outside a bar in the West Village, her collar turned up against the snow, one gloved hand tucked into the crook of his arm—_ ), and he just let himself do it, drift over to her and hold it while she put it on, his mouth so close to her neck that he could see the soft new hair growing at her nape, and when she turned she was clearly surprised to see him so close. 

“Oh,” she said, and her eyes went to his mouth. Then she stepped away. “We should go home, Toby.” 

“Do you need a ride?” he asked, helplessly.

“No,” she said, and then, after a moment, she said, “no, not tonight. We’ll be back here in four hours. Isn’t that what you said?”

“Yeah,” Toby said, “okay,” and she was still looking at him like maybe he’d do it anyway, crowd her against the wall, slip a hand up her silk shirt. Like maybe she wanted him to.

They considered each other for a long moment. It had been years. And then she leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek. “Tomorrow you owe me an hour with Sam,” she said. “And—dinner?”

“Dinner,” he said, ushering her out the door, and if the string they’d been holding taut between them dropped, it was because they’d let go at the same time.

Days he had spent raging around the West Wing. Why had the fight gone out of him now? 


End file.
